Zig is a nice small language that is quite suited to low level programming, I would say that it aims at replacing C. I like that it is a simple language, it can be learnt relatively quickly. I it is very “in the face”, as it has no hidden control flow (implicit destructor calls, exceptions), and no hidden memory allocations. This is a bit more verbose, but simplifies the analysis of what happens just looking at the local code, which is very useful for low level code, and to optimize.